Letter of Recommendation: Bushnell Trophy Cam

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A way to reveal just how wild your backyard can be.CreditCreditPhoto illustration by Ben Giles. Fox, skunk and raccoons: Getty Images

By Ryan Bradley

Jan. 18, 2018

Last year, I received an email from my dad, under a mildly worrisome subject line: “Mystery critter ???” There was no body text, but attached was a 10-second video clip, shot in the eerie grays of infrared night vision. It showed a furry creature, about the size of a Pomeranian, charging away from the camera and down a driveway. Midway through the video, the animal stops abruptly, turns slightly and stares back — if not directly at the camera, near enough that its retinas catch the light and, for a moment, glow. Then it slouches off, away from the camera and into the darkness. Watching it again, I noticed that the driveway looked oddly familiar — it was my childhood home.

There were soon more emails with more videos attached. The next had a fox — or the back half of a fox — making a rapid exit offscreen. The one after that showed a possum plodding into and through some hedges. By the time my dad moved the cameras into the backyard, he had captured another possum, or maybe the same possum, plus more foxes, a rabbit and a pair of coyotes. He had also solved the case of the mystery critter. It was a raccoon rendered unrecognizable by the loss of its tail.

My parents live in the foothills of Santa Barbara, and for years they had been talking about wanting to set up some camera traps, just to see what sorts of animals were prowling around the house. But my dad had always thought the cameras were a little too expensive and complicated. Still, they pined. For the past 30 years, my parents’ primary hobby has been exploring and settling their backyard, weeding and gardening it aggressively and making note of all the paw prints and scratch marks they encountered as they did so. When I was growing up, this was where I built forts and caught lizards, dug up anthills and found quite a few skulls, bleached and buried, of long-dead rodents (and once, a pet cat).

This sort of terrain, between the settled and the unsettled land, is known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. Each decade, the interface is carefully mapped by the Forest Service as part of its fire-safety precautions. The last effort was in 2010, and it found that one in three people in the United States lives in the WUI, and that it’s among the fastest-growing residential regions in the country: At the time, it covered 10 percent of the map. The WUI runs through the fringes of suburbs and exurbs, and in the gaps they never quite fill, but it also creeps into our metropolises. California has more people living in the WUI than any other state. In Los Angeles, I can see it from my apartment in two different spots: right in the middle of the city where the Santa Monica Mountains run, and again to the east along the San Gabriels.

About a year ago, an acquaintance recommended that my dad get the Bushnell Trophy Cam HD Essential E2. With eight AA batteries and an SD memory card (not included), the camera — in a third of a second upon detecting motion — could power on, capture up to a minute of footage and store it. It was simple and rugged: You could leave it alone for a year, and it would keep going. It owed its hardiness to the fact that it was made for sportsmen, not biologists. “Just hang it and hunt!” the website boasted. It cost around $150. My dad bought two.

He first pointed them toward a barren patch of hill where he had noticed a particular pile of scat, which always appeared in the same spot. He attached one camera to an old bench, and he tied the other to the trunk of an olive tree. After leaving them only a night, he checked. Most of the time, the camera misfires, capturing not critters but other, more mundane but still ghostly movement — usually branches bobbing in a silent wind. But this first night, right in front of the bench, a fox arrived. It trotted precisely to the center of the sightline and squatted, briefly, in the exact scat spot. “Can you believe it?” he said, queuing up the video to play for me again.

I could not, yet there it was, plain to see. For me, the pleasure in watching these videos was that they would never be entirely believable, that the images would always appear to be on the brink of the imaginary. Rather than making the world more knowable, they seem to make it more extraordinary, filled with more life and movement than seems possible in the dead of night. They’ve taken the familiar — a backyard I know better than any other — and made it strange, turned it into a place crawling with mystery. It serves as a reminder: In the WUI, the land is still part wild. Wilder than we might care to admit until it’s too late.

A few weeks ago, my parents had to evacuate their home. The Thomas Fire, now the largest in modern California history, was headed their way. It tore through the nearby creek bed and along the ridgeline above their home. Swaths of their backyard and front yard burned, but the house was saved. Many nearby, deeper into the WUI, were not. Weeks later, they evacuated again. This time a rainstorm was coming, and the fear was that the newly charred land would cause flash floods and mudslides. It did, and at least 17 people were killed. The wilderness was suddenly ferocious, inimical and close. Of course, it had always been there, marching through the yard and down the driveway, right under our windowsills while we slept.

Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles.

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